Spy Fired Shot That Changed West Germany

A discovery has upended perceptions of a 1967 killing that sent West Germany down a progressive road.

NICHOLAS KULISH

BERLIN — It was called “the shot that changed the republic.”

The killing in 1967 of an unarmed demonstrator by a police officer in West Berlin set off a left-wing protest movement and put conservative West Germany on course to evolve into the progressive country it has become today.

Now a discovery in the archives of the East German secret police, known as the Stasi, has upended Germany’s perception of its postwar history. The killer, Karl-Heinz Kurras, though working for the West Berlin police, was at the time also acting as a Stasi spy for East Germany.

It is as if the shooting deaths of four students at Kent State University by the Ohio National Guard had been committed by an undercover K.G.B. officer, though the reverberations in Germany seemed to have run deeper.

“It makes a hell of a difference whether John F. Kennedy was killed by just a loose cannon running around or a Secret Service agent working for the East,” said Stefan Aust, the former editor in chief of the weekly newsmagazine Der Spiegel. “I would never, never, ever have thought that this could be true.”

The revelation last week that researchers, looking into Berlin Wall deaths and East German intelligence, had stumbled across Mr. Kurras’s Stasi files raised a host of uncomfortable issues that are suddenly the subject of national debate.

For the left, Mr. Kurras’s true allegiance strikes at the underpinnings of the 1968 protest movement in Germany. The killing provided the clear-cut rationale for the movement’s opposition to what its members saw as a violent, unjust state, when in fact the supposed fascist villain of leftist lore was himself a committed socialist.

There is the sobering reminder of the Stasi infiltration of West German structures, but also the question of whether it went much deeper than has ever been uncovered. The Stasi’s reach in East Germany is well known; Chancellor Angela Merkel said just last week that the security service had tried to recruit her, though she had turned it down.

The most insidious question raised by the revelation is whether Mr. Kurras might have been acting not only as a spy, but also as an agent provocateur, trying to destabilize West Germany. As the newspaper Bild am Sonntag put it in a headline, referring to the powerful former leader of the dreaded East German security agency, Erich Mielke, “Did Mielke Give Him the Order to Shoot?”

The historians who unearthed the 17 volumes of files that revealed Mr. Kurras’s double life say there is no evidence to support the theory that the Stasi was behind the killing. Berlin officials have resisted public calls from victims’ groups and others to retry Mr. Kurras. He was acquitted in 1967, the year of the shooting, of manslaughter charges and was later allowed to rejoin the police force after the verdict was upheld.

In an interview with the Bild, Mr. Kurras, 81, confirmed that he had been in the East German Communist Party. “Should I be ashamed of that or something?” Mr. Kurras was quoted as saying. As for the Stasi, he said, “And what if I did work for them? What does it matter? It doesn’t change anything,” the paper reported.

Mr. Kurras does not deny that he shot the demonstrator, Benno Ohnesorg, in the back of the head, but has said the shooting was an accident. He denied records showing he had been paid by the security service, and said the agents who had put those details in his file must have been lining their own pockets.

Mr. Kurras was born in East Prussia and volunteered for military service in 1944 when he was 16 years old. He was imprisoned not long after the war by the Soviets at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp for three years. He was known to be an enthusiastic gun collector and an excellent marksman.

He began leading a secret double life in 1955, when he went to the authorities in East Berlin and asked to move to East Germany and join the police there. Instead, according to files unearthed by the historians Helmut Müller-Enbergs and Cornelia Jabs, he was told to stay with the police in West Berlin while spying for the Stasi, and he had a cover name, Otto Bohl.

If Mr. Kurras seemed to fit the bill of the “fascist cop,” Mr. Ohnesorg came across as the most innocent of victims. A student who also wrote poetry, he was married, his wife pregnant with their first child, when he went to a demonstration against a state visit by Iran’s leader, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi.

Mr. Ohnesorg’s death had a powerful mobilizing effect. The photograph of a woman cradling his head as he lay on the ground is among the most iconic images in Germany. Average students who might never have joined the 1968 protest movement were moved to action. And on a darker note it became the chief justification for violent action by terrorist groups like the Red Army Faction and the Second of June Movement, which even took its name from the day of Mr. Ohnesorg’s killing.

“The biggest milestone on the road toward violence was not what people thought it was,” said Mr. Aust, who also wrote a book on the Red Army Faction. “The pure fact that he was an agent from the East changes a lot, whether he acted on orders or not.”

While the East German government highlighted the killing for propaganda purposes, the dissension and upheaval sowed by the shooting were temporary and had the unintended consequence of making the West a far more attractive alternative to the East in the long run.

According to Marek Dutschke, the son of the student-movement leader Rudi Dutschke, Mr. Ohnesorg’s death ignited the modernization of West Germany, leading to greater democracy, gender equality and sexual freedom.

“Germany would not have become this liberal place, not in the same way, if this event hadn’t happened,” Mr. Dutschke said.

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